Thursday, November 21, 2013

The Senate has gone nuclear. My first notes are up, over at Plum Line.

I'm sure I'll have more on this, but one quick note. Soon after the key vote, Harry Reid asked for, and received, unanimous consent for committees to meet. That's normally a routine request. The fact that it remains a routine request, even immediately after the Democrats acted, is a quick answer to one question: no, Republicans will not "blow up" the Senate to retaliate for majority-imposed reform. I suppose it's possible that they'll regroup and change their minds, but much more likely will be some sort of minor "blow up" demonstration, nothing more. McConnell didn't really even make a lot of threats about it, at least not today.

OK, my prediction of a GOP surrender (well, I made odds on it, so not exactly a prediction) didn't work out so well, but this is one that it looks like I was right.

I'll also say that I don't really believe that today's action is going to matter at all in terms of bipartisan bargaining in the future. We'll see; a lot of smart observers think it will, plus I'm hearing Wolf Blitzer just now talking about "poisonous atmosphere." We'll see, but I really don't think that the "atmosphere" stuff is really going to make any difference at all.

I disagree. It could make the difference for a Republican, in that they no longer have to tag team to break cloture on nominees they want to let through, so there won't be as many ads to run about how "so and so says they're a conservative, but they voted with Obama 327 times!"

I think you're both right. Ending the filibuster itself doesn't matter directly, but it's going to have an effect on how people cast votes. Before, senators could vote yes on something that they didn't want to pass, and just blame the filibuster. That's harder now.

Yea I disagree as well. The Senate is a plum prize now to win, not a dysfunctional institution where "winning" comes with some serious baggage related to looking weak because the minority can stymie your agenda at will. If I'm a wealthy GOP donor, I go all in now on the 2014 Senate elections in ways I probably wouldn't have before.

jcbhan's comment make a lot of sense to me. Especially at the moment when harping on Obamacare finally looks like a smart play (though I wouldn't myself bet on that lasting far into 2014.)

The 2014 elections would also be the reason to do it now--almost 6 years into Obama, rather than 7.9. The GOP continuing to vote against judicial nominees would inevitably rebound if/when there's a GOP pres.

It also looks tough to the rabid right to have abrogated the agreement and just said no to all Obama nominees. Any such demonstration of utter contempt plays well with the racist rabid right. And now they play the filibuster change like it's a bullying power play by the evil Dems, which also plays into the base narrative.

Yes, I do think in fact that most political decisions in Congress these days are about money: campaign millions, or personal millions (now or later) and of course, both.

Doesn't the lack of an immediate blow-up seem like a sign that McConnell tacitly wanted this to happen all along, that it wasn't just the dealmaker GOP senators miscalculating in their game of chicken to see who has to vote for cloture?

This is the quintessential moment in modern American politics, it seems to me. A dangerous genie has been let out of a bottle, probably impossible to put back in, and the progressivish media has two reactions:

1) We're glad that genie is out of the bottle cause we never really liked it, or

2) Its potentially quite bad that the genie is out of the bottle, but the mean ol meanie Republicans left the Dems no choice.

That second rationalization is America today, isn't it? "Looking up at that mountain, you realized it was going to be really hard to climb. So you went home and watched tv. Here's a gold medal for thinking about climbing that difficult mountain".

I also really miss Christopher Hitchens today. He was memorably critical, mostly rightly so, of Bill Clinton's many failings. Wonder if he noticed that, compared to the two guys that followed him, Bill Clinton was positively Mt.Rushmore-quality in his statesmanship?

You'll have to forgive me, anon21, I forget myself. A generation ago, "climbing a mountain" was a reasonably common cultural descriptor for facing and overcoming a significant personal challenge. (See, for example, Cat Stevens' song "Miles From Nowhere": 'Look up at the mountain/I have to climb/oh yeah to reach there". Or Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide": 'Climbed a mountain then I turned around'. Among many others. From back in the day).

That was a different era. These days, we see a difficult challenge and we think not in terms of 'climbing a mountain' but rather how difficult it is, and how it is therefore understandable if we make no progress.

Thanks in advance for your patience - I too easily forget the prevailing attitude of the day.

As our host points out in a subsequent post, the exploitation of the filibuster has been ratcheting up for several years now. Working in that environment was an increasingly difficult (personal) challenge for successive administrations; eventually one was bound to "smash" it (in the face of the increasingly difficult challenge of managing around it, plus the existence of a substantial, supportive noiseosphere having zero expectation for "managing around it" from their leadership).

As written in the paragraph above, "smash" sounds like a failure, but your interpretation sounds more like the Austin Powers one (no more filibuster? Smashing baby! Yeah! Next week: down with due process!)

Used judiciously, the filibuster has a place in governing. However, when current elected officials can't tell the difference between governing and campaigning, the filibuster is nothing more that grandstanding in an ad. Sometime in a more bipartisan future, it might return as an effective tool to halt a rush to over-react.